Suzanne à Grenoble

At the Atwood Café, in Chicago's Burnham Hotel, looks can be deceiving.

To the average customer (average being over 55, eating alone or with a partner, drinking fine wine and relaxing after a long day of work), two tall, twentysomething ladies who sit giggling loudly at the table by the window as they share appetizers, might not have anything "important" to say.

So muttered the woman at the table next to us as she stood up to leave after her meal. She had been dining alone--reading the paper as she sipped on white wine--but was not for lack of conversation. Throughout our meal, we could hear this woman breathing comments impossible to decipher, but harder still to ignore. I thought she was a little light in the loafers, having some kind of discourse with herself. But after she paid and brushed past us, we finally caught wind of the subjects of her commentary: us.

My partner was rattling off an anecdote in her casual, youthful manner, and the woman in question mumbled something that we understood a couple seconds after she was out of sight:
"Stop saying 'like!'"

We were in shock. This lady had not only been listening to our private conversation, but had a beef with the way we were speaking, and couldn't keep it to herself. Now I don't care if you have a problem with the way I speak. I use "like" as a filler word, and so does most of my generation. It's fairly accepted, if used informally. But the fact that the woman was listening in on our conversation about fairly serious issues--love, relationships, and the pursuit of happiness--and could only comment on the most mundane of linguistic habits really irked me. It was as if she assumed that we were unintelligent because we have a tendency to speak in something less correct than the Queen's English.

But wait: the story is not over yet.

After Wig Lady left (I call her that because she was, in fact, wearing a badly highlighted brown spiky wig--not to be made fun of under normal circumstances, but she had already broken the rules of common courtesy), we kept saying that if we'd caught her in time, we'd have given her a piece of our minds. Boy, if I ever saw her again, I told my friend, I'd ask her to repeat her passive-agressive commentaire. So we finished our way-overpriced glasses of fancy red wine, stuffed our bellies with warm goat cheese & sweet confit on crackers, paid, and got up to leave.

It was then that we noticed that the Atwood had been sponsoring a charity donation program with Community Shares Illinois for the evening, where 30% of every patron's bill went to the organization, or any of its partner groups. There were two women chatting in the lobby of the hotel outside the restaurant, wearing Community Shares buttons, and one of them was Wig Lady! We passed by and I pointed behind her back and silently indicated to my friend that this was the one!

We walked by, glaring at Wig Lady, and then, just as we got to the exit doors, I stopped in my tracks and declared, "we're going back."

I didn't know what I was going to say, but I wanted to find out what this woman was all about, because it was clear she was more sane than we thought.

So, we walked back to where the two woman were planted, and my friend started asking about their organization. It turned out that the organization is a really good thing, and we felt bad that we had assumed the worst of Wig Lady. BUT, she must have felt pretty bad too, because in the course of our introductions, both my friend and I got a chance to present ourselves and the work we do in our most refined, elegant, eloquent language. She saw what we were made of, alright. And then some.

P.S. The reason we were at such a fancy place was in celebration of the fact that I found out I got into one of my grad schools (the Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University)! It's a huge relief, and I feel really good that somebody somewhere thinks I write real good.